FUNNY BUSINESS
Hypnotism for Fun & Health – Dr Clark R Bellows
The title of this 1946 book caught our attention during Kev’s latest eBay browse; who was having fun with hypnotism – or much fun with anything – just one year after the end of the Second World War?!
Hypnotism for health – yeah, sure. Hypnosis was reportedly being positively used to calm soldiers and treat ‘shell shock’ during this bleak period, so that certainly captured the public’s attentions.
But hypnotism for fun..? We had to find out more...
I can’t find anything on Google about our author, Dr Clark R Bellows, an American whose proud portrait greets us in the opening pages (below), aside from links to this book.
But what we can glean from the foreword, penned by Robert Francis Kaufmann – director of the American Society of Hypnotists (who also yields no Google results) – is that Bellows occupies that dubious space between entertainment and ‘health’ / teaching.
We learn that Clark Randolph Bellows is “probably the fastest and finest of all hypnotic technicians”; is a teacher at the Institute of Applied Hypnology (which I can’t find on Google, but which I suspect he might solely have owned and run); and is known “in show business” as the ‘Dean of American Hypnotists’ – a moniker Ormond McGill may well have laid claim to around the same time.
This is a short, practical book peppered with photos of Bellows demonstrating classic hypnosis moves like hand clasps and standing on women far smaller than him for ‘The Bridge’. Whether Bellows is instructing aspiring stage hypnotists, or amateurs wanting to amusing pals at a cocktail party, or is enlightening those seeking self-help is unclear.
Indeed, there’s distinctly more ‘fun’ – depending on your definition of such stuff – in this book than there is ‘health’ and enlightenment. Bellows’s sage advice on party humiliation fun includes men barking like dogs at a post-hypnotic suggestion, comforting much-loved crying rag-doll babies as a mother would, singing like women in a high-pitched voice, and “making love” to a fellow male subject who they believe is an attractive woman.
Another go-to party trick Bellows recommends is jabbing a needle “completely through” hands, tongues, cheeks, and earlobes. He always uses Milliner needles, size 10, if you’re interested in recreating such non-consensual and rife-for-infections-and-scars hijinks.
Bellows leaves us on a bit of a teaser about the power of auto-suggestion, bellowing about his next publication, “BREAK THAT HABIT” (which he doesn’t seem to have gotten around to writing, alas), rather than providing tangible instruction on this promised ‘health’ aspect.
Given he writes nonsense about being able to stare almost indefinitely at any object without blinking with sufficient practice, and his having kept a subject in a trance for 17 days (in a publicity stunt), I’m not convinced he’s a credible and honest figure from hypnotism’s past.
Is he even a doctor?! I somehow doubt it, but I admire his punt at positioning himself as a leading authority on the alluring and enduring art, science – and scam – that is hypnosis.
